Insects and the Enlightenment : Human-Arthropod Entanglement in the British Eighteenth Century

What was the role of insects in defining the human during the British eighteenth century? Through close ecocritical readings of classics like Robinson Crusoe and Emma, this study investigates insects' simultaneous absence from novels and presence in museums, reconsidering the history of entomology as both science and art.

What was the role of insects in defining the human during the British eighteenth century? If humans have always been both helpfully and antagonistically entangled with insects, why were insects absent from the stories told in the eighteenth-century realist novel? Through close ecocritical readings of classic eighteenth-century works including Robinson Crusoe and Emma, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace reconsiders the history of entomology as science and art and places anthropomorphism in its historical context. She examines how insects were collected, classified, transported, and illustrated, touching on places and phenomena such as the Dead Zoo, and shows how they helped establish a particular way of thinking about the place of the human in the natural world. Encouraging us to rethink the traditional humanistic paradigms issuing from the Enlightenment, Wallace demonstrates that, in light of newer biological perspectives like symbiosis, a renewed concept of the human is imperative.